Fat, Loud and Stupid

Great artists are only truly appreciated when they die. Kyle Baker is thankfully not dead but the time it takes for his books to become regarded as bloody great and start selling does indicate an interesting investment from his point of view. His run on The Shadow (circa 1987-9) is largely unremarked upon but, in my view, surpasses the Chaykin and Sienkiewicz runs in style and execution, deserving an article all to itself (unfortunately my collection is largely incomplete at this moment). Why I Hate Saturn is perhaps his most acclaimed work to date, but has only recently gained the audience it deserved 6 years after publication. Most revealing, his 'work in progress' You Are Here (serialised in Instant Piano #2-4) has been completely ignored, despite it being a serious progression for the author, but it's only been available for a year or so...

I seriously thought The Cowboy Wally Show was a new book. The story I heard, in recent reviews and news things, was that it had been published by a mainstream US book publisher but had bombed in the bookstores, resulting in it almost being pulped. Only an outcry from the comics reading populace had saved it and it had been solicited to comic shops. Nowhere was it mentioned it was originally published in 1988! Many works go through revival periods years after publication, but they usually get some press on the original release. CWS bombed twice before anyone noticed it! And while it is an early example of Baker's work, it manages to easily surpass most of the comics on the stands today while still being rip roaringly funny, touching and observant with the perfect sense of timing and irony that made Why I Hate Saturn such an engaging read. It's bloody great, and I'm gonna tell you why in the traditional self indulgent and over the top manner that passes for criticism of fucking good comics these days.

Those familiar with Baker’s solo work will know he deals with characters. At first you'd be excused for thinking Baker hadn't discovered the subtlety evident in his later works as Cowboy Wally is an obnoxious, loudmouthed, drunkard, sexist media 'star' from the school of Russ Meyer (of Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! fame) and Tromaville. With his huge ten gallon hat and naive belief that the tat he produces is great - what the public wants - you begin to wonder if Baker is resorting to parody on its basest level, spoofing the over-large and over-paid personalities that haunt the media he's exposed to. But to do so is to fall into his trap. Yes, Cowboy Wally comes across as two dimensional, but those two dimensions are gradually revealed to in fact be three. His refusal to lie down, to submit to the guardians of good taste in the belief that what he is doing really is a form of art. His constant optimism and genuine, if misplaced, good humour and kindness, makes him almost lovable. In some ways, this is an old trick - take something horrible and make the reader identify with it - but the old tricks are usually the best and this is one of the better ones.

The story is framed by an documentary / interview (Wally's idea) conducted by your typical Village Voice critic type where we run through the career of Cowboy Wally. This features a rapid display of almost every TV show format done wrong. Again, simple parody, but what lifts it above mediocrity is the timing. Wally is always on show and, due to the low budget of his programmes, never edits out the blips and bloops. In fact, they are the show. The first chapter runs like an old-fashioned stand up comedian with a gag a second, except the laughs don't come from his mother-in-law, they come from the timing.

This is what makes the book so great. Baker is a master of timing in the comics field. He understands how we read comics, how we digest sequence and expression and uses that to his best advantage. he's playing with the readers preconceptions of the medium . The situations themselves are not all that original or creative, but this just lulls you into a false sense of security. The middle chapters concentrate on Wally's two greatest (and most useless) efforts - 'Sands of Blood' - a film of French Foreign Legionnaires with broken hearts, and 'The Making of "Hamlet"', a documentary of Wally desecrating Shakespeare. These are two very stereotypical situations which you can easily imagine a buffoon like Wally involved in, and you think you know how it's going to pan out. But, of course, you're wrong.

I'm starting to repeat this preconceptions' thing too much so I'll try and explain how he does it. Imagine, if you will, the format of a newspaper strip. Four or so panels resulting in a pun. These work best when you're not expecting the unexpected. Now imagine this stretched over 60 odd pages, constantly interlinking with previous puns and finally tying up into one big pun which is so complex and multifarious that you wind up not really caring how or why it got there. Reading CWS for this article I was constantly picking scenes to chose for description or illustration purposes, but wound up having a favourite on every page, so be aware that I'm choosing one or two diamonds from the dragon's lair and probably doing them a terrible disservice! In fact, it's impossible for me to describe any individual passages from the book without making an arse of myself, so, unless unavoidable, I'm just going to print them and let you make your own interpretations.

The other element to the storytelling is integral to how the puns work. What I love so much about Baker's work here (and in Why I Hate Saturn) is how he builds up a situation and then lets it fall down as his realistically fallible characters try and deal with it. 'Sands of Blood' has, as its running gag, the notion of men joining the foreign legion as a last resort after being dumped by their girlfriends. Anyone who's seen the Laurel and Hardy Legionnaire film (the title escapes me) will know the premise. Lots of men lying on bunks with crying over photos of the broads they are trying to forget. After gaining some kind of 'manliness' the dysfunctional troops go to town to celebrate:

"You know what we should do? We should celebrate. We should do guy stuff. Manly stuff. On account of our newfound manliness and masculinity."

"Like beer. We could drink beer. That's a manly thing. We could drink a lot of beer and yell "Go go go go" and "Ayayayay". And belch. Belching is manly."

"I want to spit and swear and adjust my shorts on a street corner. That would be guy stuff. Can we do that?"

"Sure, but we can still go with them. Actually, it's better if you hate them. I mean, who ever got their heart broken by someone they didn't even like?"

But they plough ahead. By this point you've forgotten about Cowboy Wally, the producers cut most of his stuff "so that the more glaring errors could be edited out", but his spirit is there, unifying the theme of the book. This is where the sympathy and identifying thing happens. You're laughing at these sad cases but you can see yourself mirrored in them. Think of every time you've planned an important conversation in your head and then felt completely lost when it takes completely the wrong turn because it doesn't match with the other person's plan for the conversation. 'Sands of Blood', and indeed CWS as a whole, thrives on this.

This is what makes Cowboy Wally the star he is. While all around him (especially his long-suffering scriptwriter Lenny Walsh) are falling foul of human nature playing its nasty little games, Wally is oblivious to them. He turns out to be the epitome of what we really want to be in life. Always with a smile and a positive angle no matter what goes wrong. In 'The Making of "Hamlet"' Wally is given a week or so to make a $10 million picture before the end of the tax year. Preposterous enough even if he hadn't chosen to remake Hamlet, but then he and Lenny are arrested without bail. Lenny (and you and me) would hereby resign and let the consequences take their course, but Wally is not going to be defeated. He films the entire production in the cell with two cons and the minimum of props, while avoiding the eyes of the authorities. And the result is very, very funny.

Throughout reading CWS I wanted to see these films and programmes Wally had made. I wished they really existed and that CWS was just a biography and not fiction. This isn't out of some love of crappy, misguided films, but because the spirit of Wally would make them great. It's so hard to do a really crap movie deliberately and when one comes along they do hold a certain charm which is so hard to pin down. I reckon it's because there really are people like Cowboy Wally out there in every medium, including comics. They're fighting against good taste and aesthetic values, but they do not succeed due to some thought out vision or plan - they succeed due to their dumb stupidity and naivete and a refusal to lie down and be quiet. This is usually taken to be a flaw, but it is, in fact, a virtue, something many overly serious critics could do with remembering and which I do believe we all wish we had never lost. The Cowboy Wally Show is not just a collection of gags and parodies. It's a celebration, and, after approaching the first few pages with much trepidation, I'm celebrating more than I ever thought I would.

Hopefully there are more undiscovered Kyle Baker gems out there, and I dearly hope they are found before he dies.

Link: Kyle Baker's website

Kyle Baker selected bibliography:

The Cowboy Wally Show (produced 1988, published by Marlow & Company, USA, 1996) ISBN 1569248346.

Why I Hate Saturn (published by DC/Piranah Press, USA, 1990) ISBN 0930289722.

You Are Here (published by DC/Vertigo, USA, 1999) ISBN 1563894424.